We Are Social's Monday Mashup #72
LinkedIn’s successful IPO, Twitter hedge fund launches
LinkedinIn held its IPO on Thursday – with staggering success. The stock market values founder Reid Hoffman’s stake at $1.5 billion, as share prices jumped 140% on the first day of trading. There’s much talk of a bubble, with the IPO valuing the company at almost nine billion dollars – 584 times LinkedIn’s earnings last year. The value has now dropped to around $8 billion, but that’s still mighty impressive.
Adweek’s Dylan Byers made some sense of the story:
$8.9 billion ain’t bad for publicity, but it doesn’t mean as much as meets the eye. Over 90 percent of LinkedIn’s shares haven’t been issued yet. But that $94 price tag has been applied to them nevertheless. By the time the rest of the shares actually go to market, they’ll probably be worth a lot less.
Meanwhile, London-based investment firm Derwent Capital Markets have launched a £25 million hedge fund which will use the sentiment of tweets to guide its investment strategy. The move is based on some research from last year which found that high anxiety levels in tweets tended to correlate with the stock market falling. Which should put them in a good position to profit when the bubble bursts…
Social media ‘critical’ to a company’s marketing success
eMarketer have published an interesting study into how important social media is to different companies’ marketing strategies – the findings show that it has become far more important to companies: with large increases for blogs, YouTube, Twitter and especially Facebook, with 44% of companies viewing it as critical to their marketing, up from 24% in 2010.
But the more interesting – and correct – finding of the study, was that brands need to think about more than just fan numbers; with active engagement being incredibly important for loyalty.
Affluent consumers love the brand more
An interesting study from Affluence Collaborative found that whereas the general population tend to like Facebook Pages for offers, discounts and competitions, the more wealthy tend to have a pre-existing affinity for the brand.
Facebook creates Pages dashboard
Facebook have amalgamated several existing features into a dashboard, to make it easier to manage and track multiple Pages.
Twitter passes 300 million registered users mark
Twitter hit 300 million users last week – an impressive milestone, since they only passed the 200 million figure in February. Twopblog have some interesting data on how the user figures break down – particularly with regard to active users, with the active user count estimated at 264 million.
Twitter hires first London-based employee
Tony Wang is Twitter’s first employee in its London office – which will probably be based in the West End, and be focussed on sales.
Google Social Search goes global
Google has expanded its Social Search to be available globally, with the feature now working in 19 languages. It means that if a friend has written a blog post on a particular topic – or already shared an article – then it will appear higher up in your search results. They also plan to launch the +1 feature soon.
Foursquare directly integrated into mobile OS
The ING Cloud Touch – otherwise known as the Facebook phone – has become the first device to integrate Foursquare directly into the phone, with no need to open an app.
Journalists increasingly using social media as news source
The annual Digital Journalism survey found that 47% of journalists used Twitter as a source in the last year (up from 33% last year) and 35% use Facebook (up from 25% last year). It shows just how much social media is being used for news-gathering. What’s more interesting though is how news organisations process stories which come from social media – and the BBC had an interesting blog post on how they verify socially-derived content. However, not all media organisations are so measured, with the Guardian’s Ian Birrell ending up in a fierce argument with a head of state, with Rwandan President Paul Kagame subject to a 140 character-assassination.
Who is ‘CTB’?
Last week we showcased how Twitter has seen a bounce in traffic since users starting discussing who was behind various ‘superinjunctions’. The sheer futility of these was proved by just how much users were tweeting about CTB. Neville Hobson highlighted the more important point – the grey area the tweets are creating for reporters, when they can’t say anything despite people tweeting in such numbers. The situation was complicated further by CTB’s injunction demanding Twitter hand over the details of those who tweeted breaking the injunction.
But since the injunction was broken in the House of Commons today – we feel it’s safe to draw your attention to the video below, which explains the sorry story very amusingly:
NB: For legal reasons, we should point out that there is no concrete proof about any of the rumours surrounding the footballer in question, and we make no claim to the veracity of the video above.
Messi adds over three million Facebook fans in one week
Talking of footballers, Lionel Messi added over three million Facebook fans last week in the run-up to the Champions League final next Saturday – making him the fastest growing Page on Facebook.
A road trip – decided by social media
Discover Ireland are running an entirely social campaign this week – with fans/followers/blog readers encouraged to tweet ideas, comment on blog posts, and vote as to where ‘Nick and Sam’ should go on their road trip. It’s a nice touch which is designed to boost tourism to the country – although we hope that they’ve been reminded not to drink and drive…
Axe’s multiple girlfriends app
Deodorant brand Axe ran a nifty campaign in Tunisia, using the relationship status feature of Facebook. Despite the clear misogyny, it was really successful, and we can see the success quite possibly continuing to roll on.